Living on Windsor Castle Drive in Denbigh since the 1970s, Mary Frances Lieberman said she's seen plenty of flooding and at least two 50-year floods in the last 33 years.

There was Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which drenched her entire neighborhood, but luckily never seeped into her home, and Tropical Storm Ernesto in 2006, which pushed water as high as Lieberman's thighs in her backyard.

Residents, who live near the Stoney Run, a creek that empties into the Warwick River, still remember the overwhelmed drainage pipes at Richneck Road gushing out water and the impassable intersection of Mona Drive and Monroe Avenue, shut down for days."Water just kept coming," said Lieberman about those days in September 2006.

What triggers the constant flooding seems a perfect storm of outdated, more than 30-year-old drainage pipes in Denbigh and the influx of more homes and concrete in northern Newport News.

Starting next month, the city will spend nearly $6 million to help people like Lieberman, who live near the Stoney Run watershed, to get onto drier ground.

So far, the city already finished $590,000 worth of work in the Richneck area.

The completed projects included cleaning out the Colony Pine basin, which sits just a few houses down the street from the Liebermans, and installing a retaining wall around the basin to keep the water there in check.

New work, which will start next month and is estimated to cost about $6 million until 2012, will include improving the Windsor Castle and Windsor Great Park channels in the Richneck area by widening them.

It will improve the King's Charter drainage and Morgan's Trace basin off Shields Road near the CSX railroad tracks.

The new projects will also include the widening and stabilizing of the ditch for the Colony Pine basin and a new basin just a few yards away from Lieberman's home.

"If they maintain the new basin as they should, it will work," Lieberman said. "But if it's a mosquito haven then I will not be very happy."

The city started studying how to improve drainage in the Stoney Run watershed before Ernesto hit in 2006, but after a public outcry and several citizens meetings in 2006 and 2007 Newport News began doing a better job of attending to clogged storm water pipes after heavy rainfalls.

"The city has been johnny-on-the-spot with checking the ditches," Lieberman said. "This is an improvement. Every time it rains, they are out here. It's not perfect, but it's much better."

But other residents such as Artie Bonevich on Julia Terrace though said all the millions of dollars spent may not ease the drainage in the area unless the city expands the drainage pipes underneath Jefferson Avenue.

"Our studies say the pipes are adequate and VDOT's studies say the pipes are adequate," said Everett Skipper, the director of the city's Department of Engineering. "And we know some residents think otherwise."

The Stoney Run project will not alleviate all of the flooding, but will reduce it, Skipper said.

"What we are doing will help," Skipper said. "We are reducing the peak flow by doing this. All these additional basins are holding water and are preventing that water from not rushing at the same time."

Unique storms such as Ernesto, which dumped up to 10 inches of rain on Hampton Roads, will always create some degree of flooding, Skipper said.

Those storms will create problems no matter what, he said. "Certainly we can't say we will eliminate flooding, but we are reducing the risk of flooding."

Increasing storm water fees will pay for the multi-million dollar projects. Newport News expects to increase the rate to about $6.20 by mid-2011.

"There will be standing water from time to time. There will be some level of flooding," Skipper said. "But we do everything we can to reduce it."